ChangeTip’s humble origins began in the earlier days of Bitcoin, when it wasn’t as strong of a talking point of conversation for financial analysts today. ChangeTip, when it was just BitcoinTip, saw early on that the Bitcoin community wanted and needed a way to show off how the technology works and promote it to people […]

Today, I had the privilege of chatting with johoe, the white hat hacker who swept over 800 bitcoins from addresses generated with a security error on Blockchain.info’s webwallet. After learning that the insecure addresses were generated on Blockchain.info, johoe returned all of the bitcoins he obtained to Blockchain.info, so they could refund users who lost […]

There may be better political reasons for this move, with a reduction in American shale supply on the market just being the icing on the cake.

The more obvious losers in the current oil climate are Iran and Russia — the former of course being Saudi Arabia's arch rival in the region, and the latter being no great friend of the Saudi's either.

The pinch to shale may just be "a wonderful byproduct to screwing the Iranians and the Russians," said Michael Moran, Control Risk's managing director for global risk analysis. Further, he explained, doing nothing has actually been a really smart move by the Saudis. With every move further down in price, the actions of the Saudis become more closely watched, reinforcing the country's position as the world's oil superpower.

While this hurts the Iranians and the Russians, neither is likely to be crippled by it, budget-wise (Venezuela is a different story). Michael Levi, the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that many of the countries who rely on substantially higher oil prices to balance their budgets nevertheless have huge reserves that will help them weather low prices for quite a while (Iran). Those countries that don't have huge reserves, he says, generally have floating currencies. As we've seen in the last few days, Russia now has a currency crisis, not a budget crisis.

As for the impact of low prices on US shale, Levi says, that even if the market figures out a breakeven price for American producers (which is hard, because it varies from well to well), that's going to change in two years, and change even more in five years, as the technology continues to develop.

All of the above said, Levi cautions against thinking of Saudi Arabia as some sort of mastermind of the global energy story. It's unclear how many steps ahead they actually are.

The price of tomatoes saw a huge 10.4% seasonally adjusted month-over-month increase in October, up from a 4.6% increase in September. This is according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' just-released consumer price inflation report.

That's a stark increase from August's decrease of 0.7%.

There isn't too much to conclude from this. The prices of these individual items can be quite volatile.

Check it out below.

Worst of all, this dramatic increase in tomato prices (along with the rise in bacon prices) has led to the ongoing rise in BLT prices.

“It is always darkest before dawn.” Wise words indeed. For Bitcoin bulls and/or people on the outside looking in, it must be starting to look like Bitcoin is a very bad investment. But this selling is (at worst) almost finished. Within days, the market will turn and start an advance that will cause traders to […]

Danish bitcoin payment processor Bitcoinpaygate has officially launched its online platform. The Bitcoinpaygate service enables anyone to process bitcoin payments through their system or website. Bitcoinpaygate Announces In-Grid Bitcoin Payment Clearing Incorporated in 2013, Bitcoinpaygate brings its Bitcoin-sector expertise to the table to help clients facilitate any size transaction at any frequency. Speed and consistency […]

One of the cool things about the bitcoin blockchain is the amount of possibilities it entails. Bitcoin isn’t just a financial asset; it’s a piece of technology that changes everything. One company is building a business on record keeping by utilizing the blockchain. The company of focus is called Factom. Factom is am open-source Bitcoin […]

A raucous discussion has taken place during the last 24 hours at the Bitcoin subreddit surrounding Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr (aka Luke-Jr), who maintains the Gentoo distribution. At issue? The use of “blacklisting” certain addresses that send meaninglessly small transactions, but still require confirmation and the resources so implied by default in bitcoind. Bitcoind is […]

There isn’t a month that goes by where someone doesn’t take to their computer and check their balance in their bitcoin wallet, only to find that there’s something missing. It happened with Mt.Gox; it happened with MintPal and it even happened recently with Blockchain.info, a wallet that was thought to be a highly secure form of […]